2. Social Power, Body Power

The struggle between me and my femininity began very early…before my femininity sprouted and before I knew anything about myself, my sex, or my origin…indeed, before I knew what hollow had enclosed me before I was tossed out into this wide world.^[1]

Thus does Nawal El Saadawi enter the domain of modern Arabic novelists.^[2] This statement, rich in corporal and social allusions, is the opening line of her first published novel, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (Mudhakkirât Tabîba).^[3] This struggle, whose evocation launches the novel with the force and directness of cannon fire, dominates the work, to be resolved only at its conclusion.

What about the physician of the title? Medicine and the physician play key roles in the saga of the female protagonist. Medicine stands in this first novel, as in many other of El Saadawi’s works, at the intersection of social power and corporal consciousness. That social power permits the female to overcome the power of the male. As such, the woman doctor becomes the prototype of one of El Saadawi’s most common character types: the upper-class woman able to struggle through to a position of relative autonomy and liberation. The corporal consciousness is linked to a body knowledge that subverts claims of patriarchal superiority by showing the artificiality of socially created gender distinctions. The social power and body knowledge thematics give revolutionary force to a novel that might otherwise seem conservative in its general plot structure. After all, this is the story of a protagonist who finds a successful resolution in the context of existing society. But as we shall see in this and subsequent chapters, the social power associated with such happy endings is not available to all women.

Several of the most sophisticated and most influential writers of the contemporary Arab world are or have been practicing physicians. There is a societal reason for this: in the Egyptian educational system, for example, the best secondary school graduates frequently entered the faculty of medicine, the career path that was at once the most demanding and the most prestigious. Further, different branches of the Arab intellectual elite are far closer to one another than is the case in the West (more like the situation in nineteenth-century Europe, for example). Hence, the designation “physician-writer” does not have the sense of duality or even possible contradiction that it has in the United States today. Among male physician-writers in Arabic, the best known is certainly the Egyptian fiction writer Yûsuf Idrîs, who died in 1991. Others include the Syrian ‘Abd al-Salâm al-‘Ujaylî and the Egyptians Mustafâ Mahmûd and Sherif Hetata. In the oeuvre of each of these men, medicine and/or the physician plays an important role.^[4]

Much the same phenomenon exists in the fiction of medical practitioners in the West, like Richard Selzer and William Carlos Williams. But relative to her Western colleagues, the Egyptian feminist doctor makes less of disease and cures, focusing more often on the social role of medicine and the physician.^[5] Striking, indeed, is her de-emphasis of the therapeutic process. Often, fictional situations that could lead to the medical treatment of physical maladies are resolved without professional intervention.^[6] This Saadawian de-emphasis denudes medicine and science of part of their magical, technological power.

If the medical interaction between physician and patient is not the primary concern in these narratives, what is? In fact, the most pervasive function of medicine (and the physician) in the Saadawian fictional corpus is that of a repository of social power.^[7]

In Memoirs of a Woman Doctor El Saadawi sets forth the major issues related to medicine and the physician that would dominate the rest of her fictional corpus. Despite its title and first-person narration, which suggest an autobiographical account (especially for those who know that its author is a female medical practitioner), the text nowhere formally presents itself as autobiography. Those crucial generic features identified by Philippe Lejeune as constituting the “autobiographical pact” are absent.^[8] Despite some similarities, the life described is not that of the author.^[9]

Memoirs of a Woman Doctor is a female Bildungsroman that adopts the fiction of autobiography.^[10] Its opening expresses the long-standing and continuing conflict between the protagonist and her femininity. These sentiments extend to her female body as well, giving rise to resentment and hatred of its physical peculiarities.

The hero of the novel, who is first in her secondary school class, rejects her family’s designs for her marriage and decides to enter the faculty of medicine. Science appeals to her greatly, but eventually this fascination is transferred to nature, when she moves to a peaceful country village. The accompanying partial resolution permits the hero to make peace with other figures in her life.^[11]

Yet still something is missing, as we see in the novel’s chronicling of the young woman’s relationships with men. The first, with an engineer, ends in disaster when he tries to block her career. The second, with a physician, also fails. Only the third, with a musician/artist, finally permits her to come to terms with her career, her sexuality, and her feelings toward men.

Memoirs of a Woman Doctor tells a story of conflict and conquest. The language of its first-person narration is deceptively simple, consisting of short, choppy sentences generously interspersed with ellipses. The ellipses are not without meaning; they signal a hesitation on the part of the narrator, an uncertainty in the process of discovery of self.^[12] Surmounting society’s obstacles, the protagonist goes on to a successful, personally fulfilling career. To do so, social barriers are broken, ones associated with the body. Biology, we discover, is not destiny for this precocious narrator. Medicine provides the escape from the social and professional roles that the narrator’s physical reality dictates.

As a child, the hero of Memoirs hated

…the ugly, limited world of women, from which emanated the odor of garlic and onion.

No sooner would I escape to my small world than my mother would drag me to the kitchen, saying, “Your future lies in marriage…You have to learn to cook…Your future lies in marriage…Marriage! Marriage!”

That loathsome word that my mother repeated every day until I hated it…And I never heard it without imagining in front of me a man with a big belly inside of which was a table of food…^[13]

When, in the opening chapter of El Saadawi’s text, the narrator defines the limiting or negative nature of her femininity, she does so in a comparison with her brother:

And there was only one meaning for the word “girl” in my mind…that I was not a boy…I was not like my brother…

My brother cuts his hair and leaves it free, he does not comb it, but as for me, my hair grows longer and longer. My mother combs it twice a day, chains it in braids, and imprisons its ends in ribbons…

My brother wakes up and leaves his bed as it is, but I, I have to make my bed and his as well.

My brother goes out in the street to play, without permission from my mother or my father, and returns at any time…but I, I do not go out without permission.

My brother takes a bigger piece of meat than mine, eats quickly, and drinks the soup with an audible sound, yet my mother does not say anything to him…

As for me…! I am a girl! I must watch my every movement…I must hide my desire for food and so I eat slowly and drink soup without a sound…

My brother plays…jumps…turns somersaults…but I, whenever I sit and the dress rides up a centimeter on my thighs, my mother throws a sharp, wounding glance at me.^[14]

Not only is the hero defined by what she cannot do, by her unfreedom, but, perhaps even more important, her femininity is conceived not as an essence but as a difference—a difference grounded in and articulated through the body.

The first object the narrator focuses on is hair: hers (chained, imprisoned) versus her brother’s (free). Braids and ribbons are normally external signs of femininity. El Saadawi’s narrator thus effects a change of registers: external signs of femininity are turned into acts of confinement for the young girl. Perhaps it is not accidental, then, that her first overt act of rebellion should consist in her going to a beauty shop to have her hair cut. “Woman’s crown” falls at her feet.

Memoirs chronicles three adolescent sexual encounters between the hero and members of the opposite sex. The first involves a doorkeeper who approaches her when she is sitting on a bench and attempts to explore her sexual parts with his hand. She stands up in terror and runs away.^[15] The second episode involves a friend of her father’s. She is asked to meet him, as a matrimonial prospect. When her father announces that she is first in her class, she expects the guest to show some admiration. But all she sees is the man scrutinizing her body, his eyes settling finally on her chest. She runs from the room, again in terror.^[16] The third encounter is with her cousin, with whom she played as a child. They take a walk together and decide to run a race. When she is about to win, however, he pulls her down and tries to kiss her. For a moment, she wishes that he would embrace her fiercely, but when she comes back to her senses she becomes angry and slaps him.^[17]

These three early encounters display the same dynamics: physical violation, be it overt or covert, of woman’s body. The first example, with the doorkeeper, is a clear trespass. The second, that with the father’s friend, is apparently more complex. Normally, in middle-class Egyptian society such an encounter would be viewed as socially licit, or at least free of violation. The narrator does not experience it that way, though, and so she runs away with the same terror. Hence this encounter must also be understood as an illicit one, representing a physical violation, though one more subtle than that committed by the doorkeeper. In the incident with her cousin, likewise, she interprets his advances as physical transgression, despite her own initial desire.

Notwithstanding their varying degrees of social acceptability, these three incidents are all treated in the text as more or less open forms of physical violation, as the exercise of unwanted male sexual power over woman. In the hero’s adult experiences, however, it is she who determines the fate of her encounters with men, initiating and terminating relationships. The balance of power has shifted.

The rite of passage that separates the child from the adult is the hero’s medical training. Medicine equals power; in fact, it is this power that motivates the narrator to attend the faculty of medicine in the first place.

The submissive domestic existence in the kitchen that must be rejected, the long braided hair that must be cut, the illicit sexual advances that must be countered: all these are dictated by the narrator’s being a girl—in a word, by her female body. Nor is it mere coincidence that all these repudiations occur before the narrator decides to pursue medicine, a career centered on the body.

Responding to the societal limits and frustrations to be overcome, the narrator of Memoirs ends the first chapter by insisting that she will show her mother “that I am smarter than my brother, than man, than all men…and that I am capable of doing all that my father does, and still more…”^[18] The physical difference will not only be defeated; it will be redefined in such a way as to provide the path to superiority rather than inferiority. The body will be the conquered, not the conqueror.

These declarations of superiority are social and intellectual: the narrator will prove that she is smarter than malekind. And the individual to whom this demonstration will be made is the mother, the upholder of woman’s perceived inferiority and domestic role in the first chapter of Memoirs.^[19] To turn the page on this initial chapter, both literally and figuratively, is to enter the universe that will alter the narrator’s existence: the universe of medicine.

The Faculty of Medicine?! Yes medicine…

The word has a fearful impression on me…it reminds me of white shining glasses under which are two penetrating eyes moving with amazing speed…and strong tapered fingers holding a sharp frightening long needle…

The first physician I saw in my life…

My mother was trembling in fear and looking at him with supplication and humility…And my brother was shaking from fear…And my father was lying in bed looking at him with imploration and a plea for mercy…

Medicine is a fearful thing…Very fearful…My mother, my brother, and my father look at it with a look of reverence and veneration.

I will be a physician then…I will learn medicine…I will put on my face white shining glasses…I will make my eyes under them penetrating, moving with amazing speed. And I will make my fingers strong, tapered. I will hold with them a sharp frightening long needle.

I will make my mother tremble in fear and look at me with supplication and humility…And I will make my brother shake in front of me from fear…And I will make my father look at me with imploration and a plea for mercy…^[20]

This first exposure to medicine is interesting indeed, for here the science is subsumed in the identity of its practitioner, a male physician. That the physician should be a male may seem logical at first glance. But this gender label has deeper implications. The narrator’s choice of medicine as an escape from the confining (and confined) domestic existence of the female sets up a dichotomy between the world of science and the world of the family, exemplified by the mother who ceaselessly advocates marriage and a life spent in the kitchen. Medicine on the one hand, the traditional world of the mother on the other: these are not foreign pairs on the contemporary Arabic literary scene. The blind Egyptian modernizer Tâhâ Husayn, for example, exploited them in his classic autobiography, The Days (al-Ayyâm), when he opposed the mother (and subsequently all women as a category) to the scientific knowledge embodied in modern medicine.^[21]

What appeals initially to the female narrator of Memoirs is the effect that this man has on her family members: mother, brother, father—all three tremble before the mighty physician. The narrator would have us believe that their trepidation is the direct result of the raw power of the scientist. A closer look reveals, however, that the father is lying in bed. Why? Is he ill? If so, might not his reaction and that of the mother and brother be related to his infirmity? The narrator is oddly silent here.

This cloaking of the father’s physical state is not a literary chance. In asserting her decision to become a physician, the young woman speaks of the effect she will have on her three family members: mother, father, and brother. Their response to the to-be female physician will be identical to those they already displayed to the male physician, but with one major difference. This time, the father is not lying in bed. There is no question about his physical state. The reason for his reaction and that of the other family members is clear: it is the female physician.

But what does it mean to be this idolized specialist? The male doctor, when we first meet him, is nothing more than isolated body parts: a set of “white shining glasses” with two darting eyes, strong fingers holding a long sharp needle. These body parts, eyes and fingers, are each linked to instruments external to the body, glasses and a needle. When the female supplants him, she is transformed into those identical corporal and noncorporal parts.

The eyes and the fingers are highly suggestive. The fingers are holding a long needle, an instrument of penetration. When the narrator refers to the eyes moving with speed under the white glasses, she describes them as “penetrating.” Medical activity, whether that of the male physician or the female narrator, is redefined: no curative or healing attributes are evident. Power is reduced to its social and (male) sexual components.

And the primary vector of this power is the gaze. The scopic penetrating activity of the physicians operates in a dialectical relationship with the scopic activity of the other family members. Their glance is generated alternately by fear or a desire for mercy. The narrator’s scopic game in which everyone’s glance becomes significant (she sees the physician; the physician is first defined as someone who looks; the family members look on the physician with fear and a desire for mercy) is eloquent indeed. It becomes even more significant when seen in a Middle Eastern context. With this delicate scopic game, Nawal El Saadawi has entered a gender debate, one quite vigorous in the contemporary Islamic world, over the glance. Men looking at women, women looking at men: these issues plague Muslim religious authorities today. The power of the glance and its potentially destructive nature in creating fitna, or chaos provoked by woman’s sexuality, is still hotly debated in pamphlets that pepper the streets of Middle Eastern cities (and some Western ones as well).^[22]

The debate is a long-standing one in the Arabo-Islamic tradition; its roots go back centuries.^[23] What El Saadawi has done, however, is to crystallize the issue in a contemporary literary text and redefine it. When her narrator ties the penetrating activity of the physician’s eyes with the physician’s needle, she extends the debate. The contemporary Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi notes that the eye is “an erogenous zone in the Muslim structure of reality, as able to give pleasure as the penis.”^[24] The scopic power of the physician (from which the erotic is never fully absent) becomes a form of penetration that is virtually a violation.

This power, initially the attribute of the male, will become the property of the female through the science of medicine. Effectively, El Saadawi’s position here concords with that in a story by Yûsuf Idrîs. In his “On Cellophane Paper,” a woman, disgusted with her marital situation, experiences a change of attitude when she watches her husband perform a delicate surgical procedure.^[25] If for Yûsuf Idrîs medicine can establish the power of the male gender over womankind, for Nawal El Saadawi it empowers a woman to escape the roles traditionally assigned to her sex. In another of El Saadawi’s novels, The Absent One (al-Ghâ’ib), the female protagonist is prevented from entering medical school by her poor examination scores. In this case her mother had wished this career for her, since men were “useless.”^[26]

Medicine will do more for the narrator of Memoirs. The science of the body will help the female protagonist to conquer her own body: “Despite what is inside it and outside it of deficiencies [‘awrât], I will triumph over it.…”^[27] ‘Awrât is the plural of ‘awra, one of the most central, provocative, and emotionally laden words in Memoirs. In literary Arabic, this word signifies something shameful, defective, and imperfect, the genitals, and something that must be covered. As the signifier for the genitalia, it refers to men as well.^[28] If the girl’s dress rode up while she was sitting, her mother “would give her a sharp look,” and she would hide her “ ‘awra” “ ‘Awra! Everything in me is ‘awra, though I am a child of nine years!”^[29]

In El Saadawi’s text, the ‘awra of the private parts is made to expand and apply to the female hero’s body in its entirety. In large part the concept of ‘awra contributes to the sense of difference that the young woman feels and that sets her apart, that marginalizes her. ‘Awra is thus a sign whose signifieds expand outward in concentric circles from a physically circumscribed reality to the hero’s dilemma.

The primary referents of ‘awra are corporal: they are the private parts of the hero of Memoirs. But this loaded word also stands for the femininity of the female physician. ‘Awra can make this semiotic leap because it is, in fact, part of a physico-moral discourse in Arabic culture—a discourse of the body. In this discourse, a physical reality that in itself possesses no necessary moral or social meaning is invested with a moral value. This investment, in turn, dictates social conclusions.

‘Awra is central to the predicament of the narrator, the key cultural reality against which she rebels, embodying the sense of physical shame and inadequacy and the restrictions that society places upon her as a female. Her entire body takes on the notions of shame and imperfection. Such a generalization is perfectly consistent with traditional Arabo-Islamic values.^[30]

This narrator is treading on provocative ground. What is and is not ‘awra in woman—that is, the question of woman’s modesty—has been and remains a hotly contested issue in Islamic writings of all periods, drawing men and women, more and less conservative scholars to the question of precisely what ‘awra encompasses.^[31] The preoccupation in Memoirs with the notion of ‘awra thus proves to the discerning reader that El Saadawi is well attuned to the course of these debates in the contemporary Middle East.

That medicine helps this narrator overcome her ‘awra should probably not surprise us. After all, we are still in the domain of the corporal. But nature is equally important for her ultimate liberation, helping to heal her wounds and lead her to a rebirth. After she completes her medical studies, our hero replaces the god of science with that of nature. In the countryside, she lifts her gaze from the “wide, peaceful, green fields to the pure, blue sky” and “surrendered to the rays of the sun and let them fall on my body.” When a light breeze blows the covering from her legs, she is not hit by “that old terror which I used to feel when my legs were bared.” This environment, in effect, permits the hero to escape not only from the constraints of the city but also from those associated with her femininity and her body. She disregards, for example, all of her mother’s advice on how a girl should eat—compliance with which, as we saw, distinguished her from her brother—but rather fills her mouth with food and drinks noisily. These actions, now performed with unrestrained physicality, show once again the limitations that a female body traditionally places on its subject.

Most important, nature brings about a rebirth: “I felt at that moment that I was born anew.”^[32] After this awakening, the young physician wonders how her mother had been able to instill in her “that loathsome sensation that my body was ‘awra.”^[33] The presence of nature in the female Bildungsroman is certainly nothing new. Annis Pratt and Barbara White have amply shown its predominance in Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction, stating that “Nature…becomes an ally of the woman hero, keeping her in touch with her selfhood, a kind of talisman that enables her to make her way through the alienations of male society.”^[34] It is also a positive force that, in combination with the narrator’s medical education, can help erase social corporal restrictions.

But what an education the narrator receives in medical school! The most powerful manifestation of that education is in the form of cadavers. If for Yûsuf Idrîs the operating table was the locus of male power, a power strong enough to bring the physician’s wife back to his fold, for the narrator of Memoirs it is the dissection table that holds power, and a power that demonstrates not the superiority of the male over the female, but his vulnerability. Dissection, first of a male corpse and then of a female one, plays an important role in the development of the hero’s gender consciousness. Medicine (through dissection) will permit the physical destruction of the two bodies and with them a recasting of many of the issues that earlier plagued the narrator.

There she is in the dissection room in the presence of the two naked bodies. The male corpse lying alongside that of the female raises questions in the narrator’s mind. It is as if she were reliving her childhood and reexamining the values that her mother and society tried to instill in her. Even her previous violations will be redefined.

Why did my mother place these enormous differences between me and my brother and make of man a deity for whom I had to spend all my life cooking food?

Why is society always trying to persuade me that masculinity is a distinction and an honor and femininity a disgrace and weakness?

Is it possible for my mother to believe that I am standing with a naked man in front of me and with a scalpel in my hand with which I will open his stomach and his head?

Is it possible for society to believe that I am contemplating a man’s body and dissecting it and cutting it up without feeling that it is a man?

And who is society? Is it not men like my brother whose mother raised him since his childhood as a god? Is it not women like my mother who are weak and useless?

How is it possible for these people to believe that there is a woman who knows nothing about man except that he is muscles, arteries, nerves, and bones?^[35]

Like a series of flashbacks, these questions bring the reader back in time to the childhood experience of the narrator. Moreover, they stand out from much of the prose of Memoirs by their lack of ellipses. There is no hesitation here on the narrator’s part. We see again the essential differences between her and her brother. We relive the scenes in which the mother attempted to inculcate the values of cooking and marriage in the narrator’s young mind. But the questions extend these childhood events into a general social commentary. The mother’s actions become those of all women, and her sin, more universal.

One question, inserted among the others, overshadows the rest: “Is it possible for my mother to believe that I am standing with a naked man in front of me and with a scalpel in my hand with which I will open his stomach and his head?” Certainly a woman contemplating a male stranger’s naked body is provocative in a Middle Eastern context: one can well imagine the mother’s response. But that is only half of it. The scalpel and the opening of the stomach and the head will reappear in the book like an obsession.

Man’s body! That dreadful thing with which mothers frighten their young daughters, so they are consumed by the fire of the kitchen for the sake of his satiation and they dream of his spectral figure night and day! There he is, man, thrown in front of me, naked, ugly, torn to pieces…

I did not imagine that life would disprove my mother to me so quickly…Or would avenge me of man in this way…That dejected man who looked at my breasts one day and saw nothing of my body but them…

There I am returning his arrow back to his chest…

There I am looking at his naked body and feeling nauseated…

There I am bending over with my scalpel and tearing him to pieces…

Is this man’s body?!^[36]

Once again, mothers are to blame, for they instill the values of domesticity in their daughters. The result? The young women “are consumed by the fire of the kitchen.” But this is not any fire. The word used is nâr, a word also used for hellfire. More than polysemy is involved here, however. Daughters would not normally be “consumed by the fire of the kitchen” (at least not literally), but they certainly can be by the fire of hell, which is what the kitchen has become. From the world of enforced domesticity, woman moves into the domain of religious punishment, from the world of onion and garlic into that of eternal damnation.

What a stunning reversal of the earlier discourse of marriage inculcated by the mother! Nonetheless, the narrator has still not had her full revenge. This will come about when the male corpse is violated by her scalpel, much as she herself had felt violated by a man’s unwanted glance at her chest. The dead male corpse is made to pay for the illicit acts of the male gender in its entirety. Man’s body is penetrated and torn to pieces.

The female corpse, whose inanimate existence is framed by her hair, also has a role to play. Both in introducing us to this anonymous young woman and in closing the account of the dissection, the narrator focuses on a single body part: the hair. It begins the description long and soft and ends it in the pail of the dissection room, together with the other discarded body parts, in a striking narrative trajectory. In between, the narrator moves along the body down from the hair to the white teeth and long, painted fingernails, ending at the chest.

Much like her dead male colleague on the dissection table, the female corpse fulfills more than a medical function.

Her breasts are over her chest but they are thin, hanging down…

The two pieces of flesh that tortured me during my childhood…the two that determine the future of girls and occupy the minds and eyes of men…

There they are resting under my scalpel, dried up, wrinkled like two pieces of shoe leather!^[37]

The narrator describes the breasts of the dead female and, in a stunning shift, begins to speak of her own breasts. These are turned into pieces of meat, independent of the body. They become the active subject of the act of torture, of the delimitation of women’s future, and of the preoccupation of men. It is as if woman’s body becomes victim of these “two pieces of flesh.”

Woman’s breasts, like woman’s hair, have their own trajectory. They move from the dead body to become attached first to the narrator and then to the entirety of women. When they return to the corpse, it is as two desiccated objects resembling shoe leather. From body parts that elicit such admiration on the part of men (and society), the breasts join the lower body in a less than flattering image.

The hair is equally eloquent. When the female cadaver is first introduced, it is through her “long soft hair.” When the “long soft hair” reappears, it is directly linked to the narrator. “And the long soft hair over which my mother tortured me the years of my childhood…Woman’s crown and the throne of her beauty…” The hair effects a direct identification first between corpse and narrator and then with all women. The hair as crown is an image that El Saadawi’s Egyptian readers recognize. On the opposite side of the religio-cultural spectrum, the Muslim revivalist Karîmân Hamza in her spiritual autobiography has a narrative battle over covering her hair. She notes how the women’s magazine Hawwâ’ (Eve) always exhorted her: “Your Hair…Your Crown.”^[38]

The power of the hair should come as no surprise. After all, was it not a basis of difference between the narrator and her brother? And was not cutting it the narrator’s first act of defiance? In this, the narrator of Memoirs is not unlike her literary cousin, the heroine of Laylâ Ba‘labakkî’s novel Anâ Ahyâ, who also cuts her hair as an act of rebellion.^[39] As Nancy Huston has shown, a link between hair and sexuality has existed from time immemorial.^[40] Under the Egyptian feminist’s pen (might we also add scalpel?), the combination takes on special meaning, helping to circumscribe what is and is not the female body (see also Chapter 4).

Part of the power of these dissection room scenes lies in their imagery. But more than language and image are at issue here. In question is the redefinition of societal gender boundaries. The cadavers are unwilling pawns in this morbid game. The narrator moves with uncommon swiftness from dead bodies to childhood experiences; from the kitchen fire to hellfire; from the violation of the male glance to the female violation of the male body; from a young girl’s breasts to the shriveled breasts of a dead woman. These all seem essential to the redefinition of incidents in the narrator’s childhood. The identity of sorts between the narrator and the female corpse means that the narrator has died as well. In fact, she declares just this (“Ah…I have died”) before jumping up to run out of the dissection room.^[41] Yet she fights this identification with death: “No! I will never die and become a corpse like these corpses stretched out in front of me on the tables.”^[42]

It is as if only death could fully exorcise the traumatic experiences of her youth. But this is not just any death. It is death seen through the prism of medicine. The medical universe has once again united the social and the corporal.

The process of dissection, along with the rest of the medical school experience, leads the narrator to the conclusion, proven by science, that woman is like man, and man like animals. “Woman has a heart, a brain, and nerves, exactly like man…And an animal has a heart, a brain, and nerves, exactly like a human…”^[43] The body as physical entity is the great equalizer.

Yet there is more to medicine in Memoirs than the power of knowledge. Although at first the hero conceives of medicine as science and as an all-powerful deity, she begins to change her mind when she sees one of the physician instructors slap a patient; she now decides that this medicine, at least, lacks compassion.^[44]

In fact, medicine is not only the catalyst that redefines childhood experiences (in the dissection of the two corpses, for example), but it is also the element that will delimit the adult experiences of the female protagonist. This will be accomplished not by the bodies of the dead, however, but by the bodies of the living, in the form of patients.

The first patient the female physician encounters is a young woman afflicted with rheumatism. To add to the complexity of the situation, this patient is pregnant, and we meet her as she is giving birth. Her fate is doomed, though: she dies during childbirth, leaving behind a healthy baby. The physician finds medicine to be particularly ineffective in helping her to understand this mystery that permits life to emanate from death. “How was a living child born from the body of a woman who is dying?” This event permits the conflict in the hero’s life to move from the domain of masculinity and femininity to that of humanity in general.^[45]

The second patient is an older male peasant carried to the physician’s country home in the middle of the night. Like the pregnant woman, this man has a greater role to play than that of simple patient, the object merely of professional duty. His diseased existence permits the hero to feel pain for the first time in her life. Her outbreak of tears elicits an emotional response from the patient, who tries to reassure her. She comments, “It is as though the disease of the body diminishes next to the disease of the soul, so I feel that he is the physician and I am the patient.”^[46]

This role reversal has its function. The sick old man bears a gift for the hero: he helps her regain her faith in humanity. And as if this were not enough, his smile causes her to become aware of her love for life. She realizes that she is but a twenty-five-year-old child, “a child who wants to run and play and be free and love.”^[47]After the incident with this patient, moreover, the physician finds herself able to cast aside her earlier medical knowledge of man’s body, a necessary prerequisite for her love quest: “It is as though I had not dissected the body of a man…as though I had not laid him bare…as though I had not seen his repulsiveness and his ugliness.”^[48]

Is it a surprise, then, that medicine and patients become coterminous with the amorous relationships of this woman doctor? It is two o’clock in the morning, and the young physician is awakened by a voice: “Save my mother from death, Doctor.” The hero responds to the call and discovers an older woman, her heart weak from age. The son has to ask twice whether his mother’s state is serious. “No,” the hero responds, “it is not serious…She is only dying.” The son is, of course, shocked by her response, but she entreats him to let his mother die in peace.

This man, an engineer, reappears in the physician’s life, not as the son of a patient, but as her future husband. Their relationship begins as one of mutual misunderstanding. He has an idea of a woman doctor that, interestingly enough, has some similarity to the first scopic image of a physician the narrator exposed us to: “I used to imagine that a female physician had to be ugly or old…Wearing on her eyes thick white glasses…” It is difficult for this man to conceive of a woman who is at once beautiful and intelligent.^[49] By the same token, the narrator responds to the engineer’s marriage proposal with her received notions tying marriage to food. When he asks her a second time if she will marry him, she has a flashback and thinks about the meaning of the word marriage: “A man with a big stomach inside of which is a table of food.” She responds by asking the engineer if he likes food. His surprised reaction elicits this explanation: “Man gets married so he can eat.”^[50]

The union is doomed. It was created by her professional status as a physician called upon to save the engineer’s mother. When he asks the narrator if she wishes to live with him forever, she notes that he looks at her “with the look of an orphan child.” It is her sense of motherliness that is initially stimulated. Once locked into the relationship, however, the physician finds her husband urging her to abandon her clinic and her medical career. Her response? She leaves him.

This amorous failure described in Memoirs fits only too well into Pratt’s archetypal patterns, but with one major difference. In the prenuptial stages of the relationship, the man offers more than he is in fact willing to deliver. The woman is lured into what she believes is a relationship of mutual equality; the marriage, however, proves to be the opposite. This is the first part of the archetypal structure. But unlike the protagonists discussed by Pratt, El Saadawi’s female hero will not allow her health (read, her body) to atrophy. Instead, she leaves her husband and continues her quest.

Before the narrator finally meets the right partner, she must have a second negative relationship, this time with another physician and instigated by a man afflicted with cancer. The two doctors are in attendance in the operating room where the body of this diseased individual has been “opened.” Like other men, the male physician sees the woman only as a physical object. The narrator breaks off this relationship, concluding that she must fight and resist society’s pressures on her.^[51]

The successful relationship that represents the resolution of the narrator’s conflicts is with an artist, and medicine and a patient likewise play a significant role. The couple meet at an official dinner party, where both express an aversion to the traditional trappings of these sorts of gatherings. Fortuitously, the artist is later present at the physician’s home when the phone rings. Again an anxious voice pleads: “Save him from death, Doctor. He is dying.” This time, however, the physician does not go alone; her companion accompanies her to the bedside of a young man with pulmonary tuberculosis. The young man is in desperate need of a blood transfusion, and the artist goes out to get the blood. He also helps the physician to set up the transfusion. When she urges him to move away from the patient lest he become infected, he replies:

—And you?

—This is my duty…I have to do it under the worst of circumstances…

He looked at me in silence…And he did not move from his place until I finished setting up the transfusion equipment…^[52]

The two then sit next to each other and watch the blood drip into the patient’s artery. The physician tells her companion: “If you had not been with me, I could not have done it alone….” He replies that she could indeed have done it. No matter; the patient is saved, and he thanks the duo. He then draws out one Egyptian pound to pay the physician. She, however, faints. We later understand that this response may have been due to the intense shame she feels for having taken money from patients for so many years. The moral of this particular story? Medicine does not consist merely of diagnosing disease, prescribing the appropriate drugs, and collecting money. Rather, medicine means providing succor to those in need, with no strings attached.^[53]

This episode leads to the personal fulfillment of the narrator of Memoirs, a fulfillment that is arrived at neither quickly nor easily. What gives this incident its curative power? This most recent relationship was initiated on nonmedical, neutral ground, at an official dinner party. The medical emergency surfaces only after the couple have declared their love for each other. But this fact does not necessarily seal the relationship. The patient still has an important role to play.

Unlike the earlier phone call in which the doctor is entreated to save a patient from death (the engineer’s mother), here the physician actually does cure the patient—but only, as she herself declares, with the help of her male companion. Unlike the first visit, where the narrator in her own car is the lone person on a medical errand, this last visit is accomplished in her male companion’s car. He, in fact, does the driving. At the patient’s bedside, the medical need for the blood is fulfilled by the male. And he helps to set up the transfusion, remaining with the doctor until the operation proves successful.

When she examines the patient’s chest, the narrator realizes that his life depends on a vial of blood. Her companion asks her:

—Do you need something?

—A bottle of blood now from the emergency center.

He ran to the door saying:

—I will go in the car and get it immediately.

I sat on a wooden chest next to the patient and injected him with medicine…I prepared the blood transfusion equipment…and determined the blood type…^[54]

Did the artist wait long enough before leaving to learn the blood type from the physician? We must assume so, for otherwise how could he get the correct blood? But that is almost beside the point.

This medical ellipsis (if we may call it that) signals that the episode is not so much about medicine as about something else, and that something else is the narrator’s relationship with her companion. He goes out and brings blood, the life-giving force. The blood type is irrelevant. The two will participate equally in this activity of giving life. They will cure the patient and allow him to be reborn. As a couple, they are participating in the activity of birth, albeit metaphorically.

We have in a sense come full circle. We are oddly near yet oddly far from the physician’s first patient, the young woman afflicted with rheumatism who died as she gave birth. Here, the couple gives birth, in what is for them a life-giving process. Medicine is at last successful. And if we remember that the momentous phone call occurs in the text directly after their mutual declarations of love, after the couple has formed itself, then childbirth seems the logical next step.

It is only because the doctor is able to overcome her obsession with medicine as power that she is also able to transcend her focus on the male-female power struggle and come to terms with both her femininity and medicine. This last is now science and art, reason and compassion.^[55]

One of the interesting elements in the system outlined by the narrative is that while the female physician-heroes integrate these two aspects of medicine, the male physicians do not. The incident with the patient afflicted with cancer is a case in point. Indeed, in Memoirs, and in the work of Nawal El Saadawi generally, one really finds two types of physicians: those who are capable of compassion (almost invariably women) and the cold-hearted embodiments of science (always men). In only two short stories by Nawal El Saadawi do male physicians play a central role without being opposed to women doctors in the same narrative. And both these tales appear in her first published collection of short stories, I Learned Love (Ta‘allamt al-Hubb). In one, “Something Else” (Shay’ Akhar), the reader is treated to a day in the life of Dr. Rajab, economically less well off than his neighbor, whose Cadillac he envies. Dr. Rajab insults his staff, has too many patients and not enough beds, and feels that he has wasted his seven years in medicine.^[56] In the second text, “This Time” (Hâdhihi al-Marra), the male physicians function as objects of desire for the nurses, who see them as offering an escape from the poverty and squalor of their lives.^[57]

The arbitrariness of making the woman doctor caring and her male counterpart uncaring is evident when one looks at the strategy of Sherif Hetata, also a physician-writer (and the husband of Nawal El Saadawi). In The Eye with the Iron Lid (al-‘Ayn Dhât al-Jafn al-Ma‘danî), for example, he pairs off two male doctors, one cold-hearted and cowardly, the other courageous and compassionate.^[58]

Nawal El Saadawi develops the sexual politics of medicine in two ways: first, by using it as a vehicle for women to regain their lost power; and second, by making it the focus of her own call for the integration of traditionally male and female qualities.

This complex of elements is not restricted to Memoirs of a Woman Doctor. In Two Women in One, for example, similar themes emerge. The female hero is a medical student who is torn between her medical training and her career as an artist. The same dichotomy is set up in the young woman’s relationships with men: on the one hand there is the medical doctor, a professor in the faculty of medicine, and on the other, the young man who encourages the hero in her artistic endeavors.^[59]

The thematic nexus of science and art, entities that pull in opposite directions, pervades the fictional narratives of Nawal El Saadawi, tearing her female heroes apart.^[60] In one short story, “A Special Letter to an Artist Friend” (Risâla Khâssa ilâ Sadîq Fannân), the first-person narrator (not surprisingly, a physician) speaks of the conflict that has plagued her since birth: she wanted to become an artist, and wonders what drove her to pursue medicine.^[61] That medicine precludes art is also apparent in the novella al-Khayt (The Thread). As the patient in this text puts it baldly to the female physician, “You are a physician and not an artist.”^[62]

This conflict is perhaps most articulately expressed by the woman doctor in the short story “All of Us Are Confused” (Kullunâ Hayârâ). Here, the narrator reveals that she erred in choosing medicine: “I should have been an artist, or a poet, or a writer.” The faculty of medicine, she charges, is really the “Faculty of Illness, and Moaning, and Death.”^[63] Much the same assessment is made by the female hero in the story “When I Am Worthless” (Hînamâ Akûn Tâfiha). Here, the physician narrator expresses her disgust at both her financial and her social status when she wonders how she could possibly have lost her way and entered the field of medicine.^[64] The idea of medicine as death is extended even to the accoutrements of the physician. In Two Women in One, for example, the metal stethoscope hanging around a physician’s neck is likened to a hangman’s rope, an image that is repeated in Memoirs.^[65]

Thus medicine becomes a focus for conflicts and choices in the lives of young women, and these conflicts and choices revolve around medicine as a total system, especially as a career. Nawal El Saadawi’s writings explore the relations of power, medicine, and the female condition in other ways than simply by centering on medicine as a career. This she does by focusing on the physician-patient relationship, using a significant, and eminently characteristic, literary technique.

In some highly innovative texts, El Saadawi exploits a narrative technique that, though it brings her close to her medieval literary sister Shahrazâd, is relatively unusual in modern Arabic letters. This technique is one of embedding or enframing, familiar to Eastern and Western readers alike from The Thousand and One Nights.^[66] A female physician, acting in her professional capacity, becomes the first narrator who enframes a story told, eventually, by the patient.

Woman at Point Zero is certainly one of El Saadawi’s most powerful novels. Its external narrator is a psychiatrist working in a women’s prison. She begins the story by explaining her interest in the case of one of the prisoners, Firdaws, a prostitute convicted of murder and awaiting execution. The bulk of the novel then consists of the convicted killer’s narration of her own life. The physician is drawn to this woman—realizing, at the end of the novel, that she herself is no better than the prostitute. We shall examine this duo in detail in Chapter 3.^[67]

Firdaws’s discourse is oral: it is her physical voice that transmits her story. The voice of many other Saadawian female heroes is epistolary. The physician narrator of the novella The Thread tells the reader, in the frame, that she once had occasion to examine a woman with strange symptoms. The physician later receives a letter from this patient, outlining events from her perspective. Thus we see the doctor and medicine through the eyes of this patient, who has had a neurotic relationship with her father. The patient, addressing the physician–external narrator, explains at length that the physician’s very occupation precludes her being a woman, that she is incapable of feeling, and then poses the question, Can medicine turn a human being into a stone? The patient’s neurosis clearly connects this cold, “scientific” aspect of medicine with patriarchy.

The Thread and Woman at Point Zero are similar in several respects. In each case a female physician is reflected through the eyes of a female patient, with the patient receiving more narrative space than the doctor. In addition, both works deliberately set the patient up as the social opposite of the physician. Yet the patient’s voice, whether oral or epistolary, finally calls this separation into question. In this way, both The Thread and Woman at Point Zero cast doubt on the role of the physician as an epitome of science and wisdom, superior to, and detached from, the patient.

It is no coincidence that external and internal narrators, doctor and patient, are both women. The literary linkage reflects their common embodiment of the female condition. Physician and patient alike are caught in the coils of sexual politics.

The frames in The Thread and Woman at Point Zero show us, in a sense, only half the picture. Another Saadawian text, the short story “The Man with Buttons” (al-Rajul Dhû al-Azrâr) uses the framing technique as well, but here there is nothing medical about the internal narrative; it could, in fact, stand on its own, without the external narration of the physician.^[68] In this story, the physician narrator explains that she had published a story entitled “My Husband, I Do Not Love You,”^[69] to which a reader replied, expressing her dislike of the narrator’s story and presenting her own. The owner of this internal epistolary voice is named Firdaws, like the internal narrator of Woman at Point Zero. We will compare the sagas of these two women in Chapter 3, when we analyze the story of Firdaws the prostitute.

In both narratives, the doctor is able to liberate the stories and give them forms that will assure their life. Here, then, the physician narrator differs from her literary cousin Shahrazâd, who had to rely on the male to assure that her oral stories were turned into written, permanent narratives.^[70]

If these internal narratives could have stood on their own, without help from an external narrator, what is the purpose of the embedding? First, the external first-person narrator adds a second subjectivity to that of the internal narrator. More important, the embedding technique turns the narrative authority over to the physician, who thus becomes responsible for the transmission of the internal stories. Finally, by having embedded narratives that are not directly related to medical questions, the texts extend the power of the physician beyond the medical into the general. This can be seen in another story, The Well of Life (‘Ayn al-Hayât), in which the physician narrator tells the story of a woman she had examined while practicing medicine in Jordan.^[71]

In these four cases of embedded narratives, the stories, both internal and external, are about women. In all four cases, moreover, a physician narrator presents the saga of a woman who might not, because of her social situation, have the opportunity for literary self-expression. The physician, as a figure of social power, thus serves as a literary conduit that allows the other voices to speak out.

Here again, medicine as a vehicle of empowerment for individual women is set against the more general context of relative female powerlessness. But something far more subtle and more culturally encompassing is being intimated. As cultural critics beginning with Michel Foucault have shown repeatedly, medicine acts as a special discourse, itself a form of power.^[72] Like the writer, the physician interprets a reality, codifies it, explains it, and then reports and transmits it to other physicians. In the Saadawian corpus, the social power of the physician merges with that of the writer.

In “Qissa min Hayât Tabîba” (A story from a woman doctor’s life), a third-person narrator introduces the text: “Dr. S. wrote in her diary”^[73] This statement is followed by the first-person narrative of Dr. S. and the permanent disappearance of the third-person narrator from the story. This is an odd coincidence, indeed, the initial S. standing, among other things, for El Saadawi. In any event, the story that Dr. S. proceeds to recount is as follows: A young girl is sitting in her clinic, flanked by a tall young man, her brother. The brother asks the physician to examine his sister, wishing to be reassured about her, “since we are marrying her to her cousin next week.” The girl cuts her brother off, insisting that she does not love this man and does not wish to marry him. The brother, however, responds that she does not want to marry him for “another reason, Doctor…I think you understand”—a clear allusion to the possibility of her having already lost her virginity.

Observing the fright in the young girl’s eyes, the physician asks the brother to leave the room so that she can perform the examination. Alone with the doctor, the girl refuses to be examined, but begs her to save her from this brother, who, she says, will surely kill her. The physician decides that she cannot proceed without the girl’s permission and tells her that she will so inform the brother. The girl objects, insisting that he will simply take her to another doctor. She then asks the physician to claim that she examined her and found her “honorable.” Her brother, she again says, will kill her otherwise. But she is in love with another man and will marry him in a month. She swears to the physician that nothing dishonorable has occurred between them. (Similarly, a young woman had visited the narrator of Memoirs of a Woman Doctor in search of protection from murderous male relatives.^[74])

Examining her own conscience and the medical code of ethics, the physician in the story calls in the brother and declares to him that his sister is honorable. As she explains it later, she believes that the girl is honorable: “Medicine can only distinguish between disease and non-disease. It cannot distinguish between honor and dishonor.” She makes the brother apologize to his sister for doubting her, and the two leave. The physician then writes her own oath: “I swear that my humanity and my conscience will be my rules in my work and my art,” adding, “I put down my pen and felt an ease I had not felt for a long time.”

The framing technique here is little more than a preface to the physician’s written words; its absence would not alter the essential plot of the story. Hence, its presence is quite eloquent. This physician narrator needs a third-person narrator as an intermediary to introduce the writing process itself. The recording of the story in writing differs from the oral and epistolary framings analyzed, although like them it requires mediation. Like the other protagonists whose sagas need to be narrated by the physician, these two characters from the countryside would not have access to the written word. The female physician is once again the means by which silent voices can tell their stories.

But this particular framing highlights an important element that redefines the other enframed narratives. The opening phrase, “Dr. S. writes in her diary,” is followed by the account of a clinic visit: the two characters enter, pose the problem, the physician makes her “diagnosis,” the two leave, and the physician writes her notes. The story functions as a medical case history. When viewed in this light, the other physician-mediated narratives take on a different cast: they, too, become case histories of sorts.^[75]

The rewriting of the oath is suggestive as well. Rather than adhering to traditional professional values, this physician redefines what medicine should be by setting down her own creed. This act is subversive, calling into question the authoritarian structure of professions like medicine, all of whose members are tied by this bond. Is this a feminist redefinition of medicine? It could very well be!

With the brother-sister pair, El Saadawi has put her medical finger on a deep societal problem. Brother-sister jealousy is pervasive in Arabo-Islamic culture. In fact, the noted Arab folklorist Hasan El-Shamy has boldly argued that brother-sister sexual attraction, with the attendant jealousy, is so powerful in Arab culture that it replaces in its psychological centrality the Oedipus conflict of Western society.^[76] This conflict-laden brother-sister relationship appears in texts ranging from medieval to modern, literary to philosophical.^[77]

The sister in this Saadawian short story is frightened by her brother. Twice she tells the physician that he will kill her—a not unrealistic expectation, as we will see again in the case of The Circling Song (Chapter 4). The motivating force behind the visit to the physician is the girl’s honor. The female body must be certified as honorable before it can be handed over to the would-be husband. The brother is attempting to control woman’s body, which becomes a pawn in intricate social gender games. But he knows little about women’s solidarity. Thus the physician is able to defeat this man’s desire and give the young woman back her body. Again medicine as social power for the female comes to the rescue.

In this short story, the brother’s concern for his sister’s virginity is preeminent. Her body is a commodity whose honor, if absent, will surely lead to her death. The Syrian male writer Zakariyyâ Tâmir, in his short story “al-‘Urs al-Sharqî” (The eastern wedding), savagely attacks the marital customs that turn the female into a commodity. There, the price of a young girl is agreed upon, so much per kilo, and she is taken to the marketplace and weighed in.^[78] Tâmir thus approaches El Saadawi, who in Memoirs likened the vocabulary used in the marriage ceremony to that used in the rental of an apartment, store, or other property.^[79] The marriage-as-commerce metaphor is repeated when the narrator of Memoirs wonders if people expect her to sit and wait while some man decides to buy her as one buys a cow.^[80] Woman’s body is a commercial object, the value of which is linked to its “honor.”

Dr. S.’s new oath, with which she closes her case history, calls for humanity and conscience not only in her work but in her art as well. Medicine and art are once again joined in an eloquent proclamation. Yet it is through medicine that she has saved the sister from the death threats of her brother. Social justice becomes fused with the physician’s art, understood in the broadest sense.

The story of Dr. S., like Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, shows us the potential power of an upper-class woman in Egyptian society. She may be able to save herself. She may sometimes be able to save others. But what we glimpse already in these medical narratives is another female type: the lower-class woman who loses control over her body and who, if she attempts to regain it, will meet with physical destruction. These two types, and the intense emotional electricity that is created when they meet, receive their most powerful expression in the searing novel Woman at Point Zero.

Notes

EI² refers to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2d ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960–).